Newly hired White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia (Image: Screengrab via CNN)
President Donald Trump's new press secretary has gotten off on the wrong foot with her new colleagues in the White House — and she better fix her mess soon, they add.
The story, which was circulated by the conservative website The Bulwark, involves insider sources working for Trump acknowledging that alumna Karoline Leavitt's replacement, Katie Zacharia, flubbed during her opening session earlier this week.
"The new White House press secretary had her first press conference today. It was amazing," The Bulwark's Jonathan V. Last said on Tuesday. "I'm just going to tease this for later in the show because we are going to do a live react to the full press conference, all 14 minutes of it. It's going to be the most tremendous content you've ever gotten from this show."
He added that "at 10.03, immediately following the press conference, we got an anonymous quote from a White House official to MS Now's Jake Traylor saying, getting behind the podium is tough, but she got off on the wrong foot. She needs to get much better fast. Otherwise, she'll break Scaramucci's record. That's 11 days. Wow."
Zacharia's press conference was widely regarded as a disaster for a number of reasons. As one veteran newsman explained on Tuesday, the fundamental issue boils down to core competencies.
"The problem is it's not red meat, it's pink slime," John Avlon said of Zacharia. "I mean, there's no substance here. Even with the stuff that's designed to rally the base, because when it's simply red and prepackaged, it has no resonance, it has no credibility. And she said, oh, he's his own best spokesperson, which we expect, right? But that's because her job is not to make news, apparently, or to communicate to the journalists in the room. It is to basically defer to the president and parrot the party line."
Another veteran journalist, Vaughn Hillyard, noted that Zacharia struggled to answer a basic question about US foreign policy in Ukraine — namely, whether it would continue to share foreign intelligence with that country.
"That's a very basic question," he said. "She didn't have an answer. That basic answer should be, 'yes.'"
One Trump official privately admitted to MS NOW on Tuesday that Zacharia had not made a positive impression.
“Her 14-minute performance was more than enough to alarm some inside and close to the White House,” MS NOW reported. “During her opening remarks, Zacharia rarely looked up from the binder on the podium. She then took just three questions, all from conservative-leaning outlets. It was a sharp departure from her predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, who paired a combative style with an effort to engage reporters across the press corps.”
There are also controversies regarding Zacharia's qualifications.
Although Zacharia has repeatedly asserted on the record "I'm a lawyer," Judd Legum's Popular Information Substack published an investigative report on Tuesday alleging that Zacharia has not been admitted to any bar in either the continental United States, Alaska or Washington.